Read Fausetts recommendation for mastery and it’s interesting he says that Carcer’s teachings is dubious... does he not agree with Carcer’s high standards? If so why? And are there any other teachers who bear the same opinion towards him? If not which ones are the ones that agree with him and why?
Good observation!
I think it's safe for us to conclude that Fausett doesn't approve of Carcer's style.
Fausett is old school, though. If he was actively teaching a magic (probably Life, his true specialty), his style would be controversial too; he takes magic more seriously than most of Hightower. It's easy to imagine people getting seriously hurt in his classes in ways that most of the rich kids and their families are not down for, even if they get healed afterwards. But he has no time for Carcer's 'teach only the best' vibe. In his mind, it's every mage's privilege (and responsibility) to become the best at magic that they can be.
Carcer is not popular amongst the faculty, but some like him more than others; he gets on well with Chancellor Harrow. I think it might be fun for you guys to get a vibe for the staff dynamics yourself as you read on, though.
One thing I will say - he's really good for the university at large. Putting aside student experiences; all of the staff are world-class at their Mastery, but Carcer is a contender for best Mind mage alive (definitely top 5), and globally recognized for some of his work. That helps Hightower maintain its prestige and funding, and lets him get away with a lot.
I won't go into exact ages for most, but Lizbet is probably the youngest Antioch / Devereux student at 20 - the rest are in the 21 to 23 range, which is normal at Hightower; mages tend to take a couple of years out before going to university, to go on extended gap years and generally live a leisurely life before going to university. Long city breaks, resort stays, etc - very curated to avoid Witch awakenings, but enough for young mages to pretend at being well-travelled and urbane individuals.
Gap years are common in the UK already, but normally it's just a year - mages kind of culturally skew towards longer gap years both for socio-economic reasons (they can afford the time off!) and for mage reasons (old wisdom says that the Gift is more stable and prone to safe awakenings in one's early twenties than as a teenager - there's no science for this, but the tradition has stuck).
The Original Transplant was in the same age range. The Pactbinder doesn't have a set age but, given how they entered the world of magic, they could be older - between 20 and 29 probably makes most sense, since they don't look older than the OT, but I'm content leaving that mostly up to headcanon.
Just finished my first playthrough, really incredible work so thank you for Pactbinder. I noticed that reputation's very important, but does that extend outside of Hightower as well? For example, if the pactbinder wanted to get a job after their studies, how would that work given their reputation as a transplant? I was thinking that my Pactbinder would definitely worry about that, wondering if she needs a recommendation or something like that to overcome the stigma against her.
Thanks for the ask! Really glad you're enjoying things so far.
The job market is actually OK for transplants! Whilst there are a few mage-exclusive jobs, most mages who do work a salaried job (not very many of them, given their wealth!) just work ordinary but prestigious Ungifted jobs - there's not a whole parallel economy out there.
Mage universities have partnerships with Ungifted universities, and when you graduate you get the paperwork for both (the mages' Trivium degree maps to a degree in Philosophy, Politics & Economics, a well regarded degree in the UK). Hightower is in the top echelon of mage universities, so on paper, the Pactbinder is set to graduate looking like an Oxford PPE grad - even though they're a transplant!
Hightower's staff probably wouldn't stand in the way of that when it came to stuff like recommendations, assuming the Pactbinder is a decent and well-behaved student. The real disadvantage from the stigma is how much harder it makes forming connections and benefiting from the most powerful of Hightower's Masteries, Nepotism and Contacts.
So basically the Pactbinder, assuming nothing changes (and that their well-connected friends at Antioch don't help them out), would still be set for a pretty good potential career in the same way a poor and unpopular but decent-scoring Oxford grad might. But certain doors and opportunities might not be as available to them as for their better-connected, less stigmatised peers who formed those contacts.
about that "massive increase in access to higher education" hmmm... hmmmmm... it's already strongly implied (or said flat out, its been a while since ive reread) that academic restrictions were/are majorly due to various forms of discrimination but i figure there's more going on and i am very interested to know what other specifics you would like to share about the situation at this moment? i am saur interested to learn how your magic world integrates with the "real" world and its society and its politics and its geography and its history. The Implications™!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A few themes on higher education and its growth / its discriminations and exclusions below cut, though I'm not detailing everything as I think there's stuff that's more fun to explore in the story itself.
Short answer - Hightower has a lot of problems, and most of them are pretty similar to stuff you'd expect in the real world, magnified by the fact that the Gift's strong ties to old noble families mean that some of the incentives and pressures in the real world that drove expanded access to education / increased viewpoints as society evolved over the 20th century couldn't really be acted upon in the same way.
Exclusion - Witches. A very straightforward one. Due to reasons I've discussed in prior asks on Witches, the vast majority of Witches don't have access to real higher education - most magical universities in the UK simply wouldn't accept them. Too dangerous to themselves and others, too stigmatised. Most are kept at home and safely out of sight and mind, or sent off to specialist institutions which don't have a reputation for being very nice places. There are, of course, rare exceptions deemed magically stable enough to go to university, but it's almost unheard-of for top-tier and elitist magical institutions like Hightower and Nethebridge to accept Witch applicants.
Exclusion - Foreign Students. This one is a far less absolute restriction than the above - even Hightower tends to have one or two international students per year, usually from former Commonwealth countries (Layla is rare even by these standards of course - Egypt isn't quite a Commonwealth country). But the very elitist Universities rich enough to rely on big endowments and donations aren't keen on taking on outsiders at any price, and their students are usually very cruel to these people.
It isn't just down to Imperial elitism, though; most magical nations, at least those with the power to keep their mages at home, aren't keen on sending their students abroad anymore; mages are too rare and precious a resource, so whilst some British institutions are highly respected for their magical tutelage worldwide, you don't see the same significant inflows of international students that you do with non-magical universities in our world or, to a lesser extent, the world of Pactbinder.
I will say that this is tied to the mage population decline - during the British Empire there was a lot more flow, though it was unpleasantly one-sided - England and other big empires gobbled up talent from all over their spheres of influence to help accelerate their magical arms races...That's over now, and thus the world of English mages has only grown more and more narrow over recent decades.
Discrimination: Transplants: This one is less severe than the ones above at most places - mages need education after all, to avoid Witch awakenings - so transplants were never outright barred from study - but there is still a real stigma around transplants - this is more classism than anything, as given how the Gift is tied to inheritance, basically all transplants are illegitimate children. So the most prestigious institutions very, very rarely end up taking any.
Discrimination: Sexism and Racism: These ones line up pretty cleanly with modern history, but Hightower only started letting women study properly in the very late 19th century!
Before that, they had a couple of dedicated 'Finishing Colleges' which were kept very separate from the main town and basically gave Gifted women a stripped back version of Hightower's first year studies (partly to ensure they still safely awakened to the Gift), with some extra stuff more focused on running a household, housekeeping, etiquette and other things deemed helpful in helping the young ladies of privilege find good husbands - there were balls held near the end of the school year where Introductions would be made between the young ladies and the male students at Hightower, that sort of thing.
Even now, a century on, sexism and chauvinism are fairly prevalent at Hightower and it still very much has the feel of an 'old boys' institution beneath the surface, I think. But that's displayed in far, far more subtle ways now - more about the connections and non-academic opportunities available to women than any discrimination in the curriculum itself.
On the racism side - this is partly captured in the 'Foreign students' point above - but there's still dislike around Englishborn students like Marcus (and potentially the PB) who have foreign and/or PoC parents or ancestry...
